SQL extract data after character change MySQL - mysql

Question

I have the following data in a table, the column name is title:
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Arancia Di Capri Scented Water EDT
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Arancia
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Bergamotto Di Calabria
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Cipresso Di Toscana Scented Water EDT
Acqua di Parma Blu Mediterraneo fico di amalfi
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Fico di Amalfi Scented Water EDT
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Mirto di Panarea
Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo Mirto di Panarea Scented Water EDT
Acqua Di Parma Blu Meditteraneo Cipresso
Acqua Di Parma Colonia Assoluta Bath
Acqua Di Parma Colonia Assoluta
Acqua Di Parma Colonia Body Cream
Acqua Di Parma Colonia Body Cream Tube
Adidas Deep Energy
Adidas Dynamic Pulse
Adidas Fair Play
As you can see these are all variations of Acqua Di Parma Blu Mediterraneo and Adidas products
Is there a way to read the data, letter by letter, then when the next letter does not appear more than say 3 times, return what is before the letter change
Basically, I want to read this list and return only
Acqua Di Parma Blu Meditteraneo
Acqua Di Parma Colonia
Adidas Deep Energy
Adidas Dynamic Pulse
Adidas Fair Play
The whole table is about 70,000 rows all of similar data.
The table consists of row_id, title, category
Possible?
Many thanks
Darren

Answer 1

OK - this isnt pretty and not sure it's completely right but it's the closest i could get.
I created a separate table containing each group of substrings like this
create table subs as
select title,
substring_index(title, ' ',1) one,
substring_index(title, ' ',2) two,
substring_index(title, ' ',3) three,
substring_index(title, ' ',4) four,
substring_index(title, ' ',5) five,
substring_index(title, ' ',6) six,
substring_index(title, ' ',7) seven
from title;
and then created a query to check if a group by of one column was greater than 1 (ie not unique) and the group by of then next column was = 1 (i.e. unique) and that the previous column was a substring of the next, then just unioned together the result of each pair of columns and finally did a select distinct across the whole lot
select distinct brand from (
select * from
(select one brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by one) one,
(select two prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by two) two
where bcount > 1
and pcount=1
and locate(one.brand, two.prod)>0
union all
select * from
(select two brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by two) two,
(select three prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by three) three
where two.bcount > 1
and three.pcount=1
and locate(two.brand, three.prod)>0
union all
select * from
(select three brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by three) three,
(select four prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by four) four
where three.bcount > 1
and four.pcount=1
and locate(three.brand, four.prod)>0
union all
select * from
(select four brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by four) four,
(select five prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by five) five
where four.bcount > 1
and five.pcount=1
and locate(four.brand, five.prod)>0
union all
select * from
(select five brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by five) five,
(select six prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by six) six
where five.bcount > 1
and six.pcount=1
and locate(five.brand, six.prod)>0
union all
select * from
(select six brand, count(*) bcount
from subs
group by six) six,
(select seven prod, count(*) pcount
from subs
group by seven) seven
where six.bcount > 1
and seven.pcount=1
and locate(six.brand, seven.prod)>0) x
which results in the following
But it still has some problems as it shows both Aqua Di Parma Blu and Aqua Di Parma Medit.. in two lines instead of just once so it's not correct.